As Volker Schlöndorff’s grimly earnest film begins, Father Henri Kremer (Ulrich Matthes, more recently Joseph Goebbels in Der Untergang) looks out of place in the slate gray misery of Dachau, and a sadistic Nazi officer lets him know it with a swift blow to the head. Later images of devout priests being hoisted to their deaths on crucifixes also seem like Holocaust revisionism, but in fact, as the film’s epilogue points out (Schlöndorff adapts freely from the journal of real-life camp survivor Jean Bernard), several thousand priests were interned by the Nazis during the war, and only half survived. Kremer was an anti-Nazi activist from Luxembourg ("a small country with big mouths," as one camp guard observes), and he’s been given an unheard-of nine-day leave from camp to persuade his diocesan bishop to accept the Occupation. The resultant "Diary of a Concentration Camp Priest" intercuts Kremer’s torments of conscience with flashbacks to the literal torments behind the barbed wire. Despite the harrowing performance of the emaciated Matthes, Schlöndorff’s way of the cross adds little insight into either form of suffering.